At Weddings and Wakes

Chicago Tribune

At once a haunting evocation of life's inexplicable calamities and a magical celebration of childhood and familial love, At Weddings And Wakes transforms every experience into the heroic and the universal. It is a testament to the remarkable gift of a literary master writing at the peak of her story telling powers. A brilliant, highly complex, extraordinary piece of fiction and a triumph for its author.

Newsweek

It's hard to lift your eyes at the end of the book... you'll find yourself reading every word of Alice McDermott's new novel, not because it's complicated but because such wonderful things happen deep inside the sentences.

San Francisco Chronicle

A haunted, troubled, beautifully articulated journey into the past.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This nuanced, elegiac and emotionally charged evocation of a close-knit Irish Catholic family--a BOMC selection in cloth--spent five weeks on PW 's hardcover bestseller list.

Library Journal

Set in the '60s, McDermott's third novel tells the story of an extended Irish-American family observed primarily through the eyes of the children, a son and two daughters. Time circles backwards and forwards around a variety of family rituals: holiday meals, vacations at the shore, the wedding of a favorite aunt. The poignant middle-aged romance that develops between the aunt, a former nun, and her suitor, a shy mailman, exacerbates already pronounced family tensions. As they listen to oft-repeated stories about poverty, disease, and early deaths, the children are solemn witnesses to the Irish immigrant experience in America. By turns wry and sad, is was McDermott's finest novel to date. -- Barbara Love, St. Lawrence College, Kingston, Ontario

Library Journal

Set in the '60s, McDermott's third novel tells the story of an extended Irish-American family observed primarily through the eyes of the children, a son and two daughters. Time circles backwards and forwards around a variety of family rituals: holiday meals, vacations at the shore, the wedding of a favorite aunt. The poignant middle-aged romance that develops between the aunt, a former nun, and her suitor, a shy mailman, exacerbates already pronounced family tensions. As they listen to oft-repeated stories about poverty, disease, and early deaths, the children are solemn witnesses to the Irish immigrant experience in America. By turns wry and sad, is was McDermott's finest novel to date. -- Barbara Love, St. Lawrence College, Kingston, Ontario

School Library Journal

Complex family relationships are explored from the viewpoint of three children whose mother takes them on a weekly trip to her childhood home in Brooklyn to visit Momma, their martyred grandmother, and three aunts: Veronica, an overprotected recluse; Agnes, a sophisticated career woman; and May, a sweet former nun whose marriage and death are foretold in the title. The visits are rituals during which the youngsters, obviously adored by the women, are nonetheless absent-mindedly ignored by all except May. Over the predictable meal, the adults indulge in lamentations and vague complaints related to Momma's tragic past and the unsatisfactory marriage of the children's parents. In spare poetic prose, McDermott deftly weaves past and present as seen through the fresh, uncritical eyes of the children. The setting is sensually described in contrasts: the majesty of the Church, the drabness of the Brooklyn apartment, the sterility of suburbia, and the freedom of the family's ocean vacations. -- Jackie Gropman, Richard Byrd Library, Fairfax, Virginia

Wall Street Journal

A haunting and masterly work of literary art.

Michiko Kakutani

A beautifully wrought novel…about all families and all families' encounters with love, morality, and sorrow.
— Michiko KakutaniThe New York Times